


Empty Bookshelves

by thegirlnamedcrow



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 18:05:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1275880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirlnamedcrow/pseuds/thegirlnamedcrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She must go forth alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty Bookshelves

Her life is full of empty spaces. The swath of vacant floor opposite the lone chair in her flat. The bare shelf, unfilled with books she’ll never read. The cupboards completely devoid of food.

The silence hangs heavily upon her; she can acutely feel its presence, walling her away from the rest of the world even as she walks through it.

There were others, once, but one by one they’ve gone, and each loss has left her more alone than ever. She takes comfort in her solitude. It keeps her strong, keeps her focused. People only complicate things. It is so much easier to care in the abstract, to see society as a whole without registering its disparate parts.

Still, sometimes, when she returns to her empty flat after yet another night of serving drink after drink to strangers who will never even know her name, she drifts back and misses the way things were. There was always something to distract her from the starkness of reality. Nothing they had done had ever made the slightest difference, but at least for a time action gave her a purpose, made her believe that she was not so helpless after all. She had a cause, a shared cause, and it was so much easier to keep sight of her goals when fighting alongside so many others.

But she cannot allow herself to entertain nostalgia for long. She must remember that it is only now that they are gone that she is truly free to fight for them. Only now that she has had to sit with her uncertainty that she can truly know the meaning of conviction.

She will never forget the ones who have passed. But she must go forth alone.


End file.
